City Spy: City runners with sights on tackling blindness

Thursday 11 July 2013 12:38 BST

Conditions are likely to be little short of sweltering for tonight’s annual Standard Chartered Great City Race, which will see more than 5000 workers from City firms running through the closed-off streets of the Square Mile.

Former England cricket star Mike Gatting, ex-Paralympian Noel Thatcher and Harlequins rugby player Nick Evans are among the celebrities taking part, alongside Richard Holmes, StanChart’s European chief executive. They will run the race blindfolded in aid of charity Seeing is Believing, the global initiative to tackle avoidable blindness and official race beneficiary. Find out more at cityrace.co.uk.

Carney’s meeting of note for females

Just nine days into the Mark Carney regime, and there is no doubt what’s at the top of the new Bank of England Governor’s in-tray — women on banknotes.

The Bank breathlessly announces a meeting between its head of notes and chief cashier and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, the Huffington Post journalist who is threatening to take the Bank to court for discrimination under the 2010 Equality Act.

Yesterday’s “productive” talks apparently “provided a valuable opportunity to hear and discuss Ms Criado-Perez’s concerns”. This is the Bank’s second public statement on the matter since Carney took over: setting interest rates now looks like a mere sideline.

Despite the loss of social reformer Elizabeth Fry from the fiver, Jane Austen now looks a shoo-in for the tenner. If a woman doesn’t appear on the next note, the Canadian may be run out of Threadneedle Street before he’s even got going.

* Barratt Developments chief executive and tennis fan Mark Clare wasn’t cheering on Andy Murray at Wimbledon this year. He was on the other side of town listening to his wife — one of 16,000 Rock Choir members — singing at the O2 Arena.

* Best of luck to Shane O’Riordain, lead spinner on the Royal Mail float. Some in the City remember the Irishman as top PR man to James Crosby when he was leading the former building society Halifax, which floated on the stock market to the great benefit of the nation. At one point, a blinking O’Riordain had to face the TV cameras and insist not everything was going wrong at HBOS, even as it collapsed into the arms of Lloyds Banking Group. Perhaps the Royal Mail float will prove as great a success.

Long farewell: Informa chief stays on a while to avoid being ‘slagged off’

So farewell to Peter Rigby, the long-serving and self-deprecating chief executive of publisher and events group Informa, who is stepping down after 25 years at the helm and 30 years at the company.

Such loyalty is rare in an industry where many media executives hop jobs every other year. Rigby, pictured, a cricket fan, already owns a shirt that says Not Out in recognition of his long tenure.

He jokes: “Maybe it should say Retired because no one got the wicket.” Aged 58, he is still relatively young and wants to “say hello to my family a little bit more”.

He surprised senior staff at a dinner the night before yesterday’s Stock Exchange announcement by telling them about his retirement, although he will stay until the end of the year when successor Stephen Carter starts.

“I just want to make sure the business I hand over on 31 December is a good business,” he says. “As I said last night, I don’t want you to slag me off when I’m gone.”

* Stephen Carter, aka Lord Carter, the new boss of Informa couldn’t be more different than Rigby. He has had many jobs, including running UK ad agency JWT in the 1990s and doomed telecoms firm NTL at the turn of the millennium, before serving as the first chief executive of regulator Ofcom. Then Carter suffered an unsettled spell when he held a series of jobs for barely a year at a time. In quick succession, he was chief executive of public relations agency Brunswick, principal adviser to Gordon Brown at Number 10, and then business minister. He got a peerage but quit even before he published his Digital Britain Report. It took until 2010 to land a steady post at French telecoms firm Alcatel-Lucent. He knows Informa as he has been a non-executive director since 2010. Just don’t expect a Rigby-style marathon tenure from Carter. Incidentally, Informa shares fell 1.6% after news of his appointment.

* What is the point of Carter having a seat in the House of Lords? According to the Public Whip website, he has been “absent” for every vote since 2009.